Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Worlds Collide Amidst the Renoirs

David Hertzberg’s The Wake World

Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O17

Barnes Foundation

September 23, 2017

World Premiere

Is this real life, or is it just fantasy?Photo credit: Opera Philadelphia

The Wake World was
commissioned for Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O17 as a site-specific work to
be staged in the very special Barnes Foundation museum (which is wonderful, by
the way, and deserves a visit to Philly on its own right). The audience was
encouraged to roam around the museum for an hour before the beginning
of the performance. The sense of anticipation was palpable and we were not
disappointed, as sure enough some strange individuals started popping out in
the various museum rooms, walking around and checking out the paintings as
normal museumgoers. Except they were wearing all blue, pink or grey outfits
with matching face paint, or else they looked exactly like characters in some
of the paintings, in a way suggesting that they just popped out of the art
work.

When the opera finally started, however, it was not in the
exhibition portion of the museum, but rather in the Annenberg Court, a large
hall immediately adjacent to the galleries themselves. A bit disappointing, as
it would have been terrific to have the characters go through their journey
amongst the actual paintings. Admittedly, however, that would have presented
insurmountable logistical challenges. The immersive side of the performance was
very strong even in the large hall as the audience was free to walk around and
follow the singers as they moved on the long catwalk. I have to say that there
was something very special about being so close to the singers (and to the
composer and director, both of whom followed the action along with us, almost
like characters in the show) as they performed.

Some characters seem to have descended from the paintingsPhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Director R. B. Schlather brought some striking ideas to the
staging of composer David Hertzberg’s surreal and fantastical (though
ultimately pointless) riff on a wild and wacky short story by the sometimes-mystic
occultist writer Aleister Crowley. I say riff because he slapped a sort of
prologue onto it, swapped out the overall naive and playful tone of the
original (ostensibly a tripped out children’s story) and replaced it with a
more dramatic overall melancholy tone of moping. Most of all he gave it a spin
by endowing it with something recognizable as an ending, which was perhaps the
most poetic, most visionary and potentially most moving part.

The monochrome people look like brushstrokesPhoto credit: Opera Philadelphia

At the end of the roughly ninety minute long one-act opera, the
Fairy Prince suddenly reveals himself to be a shapely woman with luscious long
flowing locks of hair. He who is now a she (though, as they say these days,
gender is just a construct anyway) appears on the end of the catwalk in a
stunning translucent nightgown with an armful of flowers and sings a song of longing
and love for her now absent Lola. Then Lola appears with her own armful of
flowers and in a matching translucent slip for their big very wide-awake world
reunion in the afterlife, presumably. The way the two of them glow in the light
of their love for one another is also as though they have actually shed their
mortal human clothing and transcended the earthly plane to become angels. The
moment has no analogue in the original story but was among the most satisfying
passages of the opera.

Let the ghostly frolicking beginPhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The apotheosis is complete once the two frolic off together and
end up running into the distance, out the exit doors, and into the garden of
the Barnes Foundation, literally out into the “real” world outside, beyond the
panes of glass where they dance like woodland ghostlike creatures by the
scenic reflection pool. What does that make the wake world? And the wide-awake
world? And the world after death? Which is which? The mystery remains an open
question, in this respect, not unlike the Crowley story, which ends with a
reference to a serpent eating its own tail – the classic insoluble knot, the
conundrum to end all conundrums.

While Crowley utilizes Lola’s transhumance as a commentary on the
habits of mind (like those forged by conformity and social conditioning) that
make us who we think we are, Hertzberg seems to be less concerned about the
construction of the self and more concerned with the spirit or the soul.

A dreamlike encounter in the prologuePhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Hertzberg also ups the ante on the poetic register. The texture of
Crowley’s prose is rather plain and Lola’s narrative voice is intentionally
confident but naive and playful. The entirety of Hertzberg’s text is almost overly ornate, full of archaic and rare aulic terminology and rife with
alliteration more often than not. Which is not a characteristic of Lola’s first
person narration in the original text at all.

The bog behind this
stooping brow

Hath its measurements
congealed.

Say what? Several of the Dream characters, a couple of whom seem
to reference figures found in the paintings in the museum, especially the two
bedraggled men in the prologue, speak with pseudo-archaisms as in this bit
quoted above. Or else: “The patch, she devoureth herself.” (Huh?) Their verbs
end with Shakespearean -th suffixes and are paired with doth’s and
hath’s and shalt’s. Many made up words abound, especially those that have a
peculiar pseudo-antiquated flair.

(Huh?) However, when Lola begins speaking in the early segment
called, “II. The Beginning,” all of the hifalutin gibberish goes out the
window. This is where the Crowley story begins and we seem to enter the world
of the Fairy Prince’s palace proper. Very little, if anything, was done to
intimate the space of a palace. Aside from a catwalk that ran the length of the
long rectangular Annenberg Court, the large reception hall where visitors
congregate to enter the Barnes Foundation, there was no set to speak of.
Instead Hertzberg created an otherworldly place out of his use of shards of
language and an immersive sound experience that was brought to life by the
Opera Philadelphia Chorus. Words repeated and syllables alliterated in the
construction of phrases that unfolded into what could possibly pass as sense or
meaning.

Strangers, why do you stand
there

Smiling softly in sinister
silence?

Soprano Maeve Höglund in the principle role of Lola, “the
key of all delights,” sang her heart out and eventually sang her clothes off
and her silky skin and her bones. Her character seemed to get her vestments
from one of the Renoirs in the collection, or else Alice in Wonderland for the
adult crowd. It was definitely Höglund who buoyed the whole show with her
charismatic presence as well as her singing. Her muscular soprano pined with
longing, lusted with feeling, was conflicted in her desire and worked
through many surreal doldrums and other abstractions along the way.

The Fairy Prince was sung by mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb who
played “him” as a sort of Annie Lennox or mid-1980s Madonna in drag as a man in
a three piece double-breasted suit, hair pulled back and wielding a gentleman’s
pipe. Chaieb cut a commanding figure as she toyed with her little plaything
mostly from afar. A cloud of gender-stereotyped behavior hung heavy over their
interactions. At one point little Lola grovels at her Fairy Prince's feet for whose
dear indulgence she supplicates as she grabs his knees.

The torment continuesPhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco

There was even a woman dressed in a full body flesh-colored
jumpsuit who looked like a Renoir nude, complete with the eroticized knee high
white stockings and red high heels. She seemed to have stepped right out of one
of the Renoirs that Dr. Barnes, in one of his elaborate symmetrical wall
compositions, paired with a still life of bulbous apples that recall the female
form in one of the sensory overload rooms in the galleries through which we
were invited to wander in anticipation of the start of the opera.

For all the vagaries of the libretto and its improvement upon the
source material, Hertzberg’s score constituted a highly sophisticated piece of
music. It was suggestive and dreamy and beautiful in every bar. He never
reverts to strange or jarring dissonance just for the sake of creeping the
audience out. Musically he creates ambience, a stunning sense of space and
place. It was incredibly listenable. Hertzberg’s music definitely takes you
places – flashes of Debussy, maybe, and Saariaho, only without the cacophonous
weird bits.

Most of all, I thought of Bartòk’s Bluebeard’s Castle,
perhaps mostly in terms of its enigmatic narrative structure and its unsettling
palatial architecture, musical and otherwise. Like Bartòk, Hertzberg’s score as
well as his libretto keep you on the edge of your seat in wonder. Where is he
taking us? What does it all mean?

The shame it seems to me is that such visionary and refined talent
continues to be wasted on such superficial and shallow projects. Audiences are
hungry for real depth and emotional breadth. They can wrap their minds around
challenging and complex material when the mind of the creator rises to that
level and gives us something of substance to grapple with, yet so many of our
contemporary composers give us trifles.

Singers like these are also capable of delivering an even greater
range of emotions and of inhabiting more complex dramatic scenarios than the
relatively monotone ramblings composers frequently give them to communicate.

There are lessons to be learned from the repertory that musicians
and singers in circulation at the moment know and play well. Why have we lost
the sense of a Norma, for example? A character who undergoes a real journey not
only through disappointment and great adversity but also through the whole
range of human and musical emotions. There is something to be recovered from
the soprano assoluta role, even if she is not composed as the Everest of
opera.

This Alice is a little lost lamb in her wonderlandPhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Hertzberg is one of the most exciting composers experimenting with
narrative musical forms that I have encountered of late. I’m eager to see
where his talent evolves and where his vision takes him. I hope he manages to
marry his highly articulate flights of fancy with something that is also rooted
in the ground of an even more fleshful human experience. If The Wake World is
any indication, Hertzberg has it in him.

– Lei & Lui

The reflection pool at the Barnes Foundation with a Wake World installationPhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco

"The Language of the Wake World is silence," Aleister CrowleyPhoto credit: Allegri con Fuoco